Electronic customer service

I guess this one is all my fault. The trip to South Carolina sort of distracted me and I didn't send out checks on time to pay bills. The Obvious Electronic Age Answer: pay the bills online!!! After all, I still had 48 hours.

Electric company bill worked instantly. Cell phone account worked—sort of. Sprint thinks they got the money, but my bank doesn't think they sent it. Car payment? Total disaster.

After logging into the website, setting up an account, answering all the weird questions, putting in my account numbers and everything else, I thought I had succeeded. I checked back 24 hours later and still owed them the money. Phoned the woman at Toyota Financial and she said there was no record of me ever doing anything (though I was welcome to make a payment through her for a $10 fee). My bank says the money never came out of the account. I raced downtown to another bank where I have an account and asked what we can do to expedite a payment. They very helpfully set me up for online payment (apparently pushing the money works better than pulling it). And guaranteed that the money would be there within 24 hours. Back to the apartment. Digging through an obscure corner of the Toyota website, I discovered that the original payment is "in process" and will be made tomorrow too. Two payments for Toyota. Cheers!

The moral of the story:

1. Online bill payment is slow. I would probably have been better off driving to the dealer and handing someone a check. Figure at least three working days (not counting weekends and holidays).
2. Online bill payment can be very expensive. Sure, the electric company did it for free, but Toyota financial wanted $10. Citibank wants $15 to allow an online transaction.
3. Reliability is questionable. Did it work? Didn't it? Keep checking back, folks.
4. Online bill paying is very time-consuming. I can write a check and pop it into an envelope in five minutes. I can pay a bill online in ten, but that doesn't count the time wasted in returning to the website to make sure it actually worked, time on the phone to straighten out things, and (at least with the car payment) time to drive downtown to ask someone to expedite a payment. The time discussion doesn't include the initial fifteen minutes per bill that's needed to set things up, either.
   
5. Customer service reps are variable. Sprint's phone people are wonderful. They need to be because the guys at Best Buy really don't know what they are doing, and the phone support people at Sprint have to keep straightening out screw-ups. Toyota's people haven't a clue what they are talking about.

The lady at Chase Bank was really eager to get me to set up online bill paying. Said it would save me so much time and money. Let's see.

• Six bills @ fifteen minutes set-up time per bill (one time) = 1.5 hours
  
• Six bills per month @ 10 minutes each = 1 hour per month
• Add another five minutes per bill to check whether the payment posted = half an hour per month

Annual time investment to pay six bills online = 19.5 hours. Money saved on stamps = $15.84. My rate of pay = 81 cents per hour.